A television network may show live streams of content. This network may include many different local channels that play different live streams depending on their respective locations. For example, during the same time slot, a first channel may play a first sporting event from teams close to its associated location and a second channel may play a second sporting event from teams close to its, different associated location. This is just one example as there may be multiple different combinations of content for different channels for a single network.
For each local channel, source streams are interwoven together into a single linear stream. The principal operation of networks is that live streams are organized into separate linear streams for each channel and each linear stream is sent separately even if multiple linear streams include the same content. For example, from a time slot of 7:00 p.m.-8:00 p.m., the first channel and the second channel may show the same sports talk show, but from 8:00 p.m.-10:00 p.m., the first channel shows a first sporting event and the second channel shows a second sporting event. This means that the first channel has a first linear stream including the sports talk show and the first sporting event and the second channel has a second linear stream including the sports talk show and the second sporting event. In this case, storage for the first linear stream and the second linear stream are required, which means the sports talk show is stored twice. This is just a simple example and some networks may have a large amount of source streams, which can be interwoven into multiple different combinations. This may require hundreds of interwoven linear streams to be generated. All of these linear streams need to be stored at content distribution networks (CDNs). The CDNs charge for storage and having the large amount of linear streams for every combination stored at the CDN may become a large expense.